No dawn chorus this morning or if there is we’re not going to hear above the whistling, rattling wind but at 4.30 we hear the recycling bin, which we’ve put out on the pavement, blow over. I don’t want any paperwork I might have put in there blowing down the road so I pull on some jeans and grab my jacket and wedge it back under the lamp-post. But it blows over again 15 minute later so I have to trot out again and bring back to the shelter of the porch until breakfast time.
Category: Habitats
Smeath House
Smeath House, Horbury, my home for twenty years, right through my school and art college days, went on the market today. Looking at Tim Baker’s photographs in the brochure, I can see that the ambience of the place had an effect on the way my work developed. Aged nine, I filled an exercise book with sketches and nature notes including a map of the birds I saw around the shrubberies and lawns.
I can see why I’ve always been fascinated by the Victorian period, surrounded as I was by so many period features. In the 1960s there were still people around, my grandparents for instance, who grew up in the last days of Victorian England. Our era seemed rather colourless and mundane compared with the world of Dickens and Thomas Hardy.
The house was built by the Baines family who were worsted spinners with mills in the valley below. There’s a box-shaped bay window on the west-facing corner of Smeath House which my brother imagines Richard Baines standing at early each morning to check that his foreman had stoked up the fire for the steam engine that drove the machinery.
We met Enid Baines, a daughter of the family, in the late 1950s or early 1960s when she revisited Smeath House. Her mum was then aged 100 but didn’t come with her. I would love to have seen any family photographs showing Smeath House in its Victorian heyday.
Links
Smeath House, Hodsons estate agents
Smeath House Flipbook looks so attractive, I wish that I could afford to make an offer!
The Woman over the Window
There are carved heads on keystones above the entrance and the windows of this Venetian palace style branch of the Wakefield and Barnsley Union Bank (now occupied by Barclays) built in Ossett in 1870. The Santa Claus lookalike above the door seems to be a portrait, perhaps of the first manager, but this woman over the window has classical proportions and probably represents a mythological figure.
The man in a winged helmet over another window is probably Mercury but it would be nice to think that he was Osla the Viking, who, according to one interpretation of the town’s name, settled at ‘Osla’s seat’ or ‘Osla’s ridge camp’ a century and a half before the Battle of Hastings.
Green Spire
The lime trees in the gardens of Victorian villas in Horbury are characteristically tall and columnar in shape. When they need to be replaced the tree officer for the local council requests varieties which have a similar shape; Tilia cordata ‘Rancho’ or Tilia cordata ‘Green Spire’.
Ornamental heathers are now bringing some early spring colour into gardens.
Lichens on Poplar
These lichens, yellow Xanthoria parietina and pale Parmelia saxatalis, were growing on a poplar at Alverthorpe Meadows which we walked around with friends Roger and Sue recently.
In a nearby tree was a mystery bird. It was the size of a song thrush but had the streaky spots of a mistle thrush. On a dull day looking up at it silhouetted amongst the bare branches I couldn’t get much further with an ID but luckily 
Roger had brought his bridge camera with a powerful telephoto and when we viewed the bird on screen when we got back we could see clearly that it was a redwing. It’s unusual to see just the one redwing on its own, so I think that threw us.
But the trees won’t be bare for much longer. It’s good to see the blossom (not sure what species this is) appearing. But whatever time of year there’s always something to see, even if it’s just the bracket fungus on a willow or the magpies busy repairing their nests.
We met one of the Wakefield countryside rangers who told us she was planning the annual toad-count. She realises 
that it’s important to choose the right night for it – mild and damp – or you won’t get a good impression of the numbers.
Auntie Bar
As an 9 or 10 year old I pinned a map of Africa on my bedroom wall, surrounded by a collection of the 3D models of African animal heads that they printed on the back of Corn Flake packets. I hoped that some day I’d be able to fly out to Tanganyika to visit my godparents, Barbara and Jack Wilkinson, though sadly that never happened. I’ve still got the five inch tall ebony warrior that they sent me. He still sports his feathery plume, hide shield and Masai regalia but he lost his spear long ago.
Jack taught biology at the agricultural college at Arusha, close to the Kenyan border. It’s a beautiful setting with Mount Meru and Kilimanjaro looming in the background. Returning to Britain when Tanzania won its independence, they settled in Leek, Staffordshire, where Jack continued to teach biology. He died of cancer about thirty years ago.
Barbara was doing fine when we visited her last summer before my mum’s fall but she too had a fall at new year. She died on the morning of my mum’s funeral. Like my mum she was in her 97th year.
We made our way, via the Peak District, to her funeral today. I’ll miss our occasional visits to Leek to meet up with her and go out for a lunch, which for me was always Staffordshire oatcakes (a kind of pancake), at the White Hart Tearooms.
Frogfest
I looked out the other day and there were at least twelve frogs in the pond. Today I counted nine clumps of frogspawn. Usually the spawn is laid at the shallow, sunnier end of the pond. This year it’s all at the overgrown, deeper end, partially shaded by the shed.
Since I wrote this, my neighbour 
Jack across the road has offered me a bucket of spawn which he always clears from his tiny pond. I don’t really need any more but I’d rather take it because otherwise he’d put it in the stream, which is fast flowing so it would just get flushed away into the river. I’m trying to work out if I can fit in a mini-pond or two into the odd corner of my garden as I know ponds have been filled in in adjacent gardens and the frog population will soon start struggling.
Hedgehog Dropping
Hedgehog Dropping
On a mossy patch of back lawn near the pond there’s a single hedgehog dropping and, a foot or so from that, a clayey fox scat with the typical pointed end.
School Chair
This school chair is less than three feet high. I like the way the back legs taper together towards the floor, giving a wider back at the top, while the front legs splay outwards to give stability. The change from the square section at the back to round at the front gives it an organic charm, as if it had grown rather than being popped out of a mould in a factory, like a modular 21st century stacking school chair.
Uniglaze
I enjoy drawing bits of buildings, often the side that the architect didn’t intend us to see. This window showroom at the top end of Cluntergate, Horbury, was drawn with a fine Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen as we sat in the Caffe Capri opposite.
The watercolour was added later using a photograph I took on my Olympus Tough as reference.
Janet’s Foss
I tried out my new Leki monopod/walking pole on Sunday, attaching my Olympus Tough to it to film Janet’s Foss, near Malham. Even with this small camera mounted on it, the pole was useful when stepping over damp limestone boulders to get nearer to the waterfall.
Although a lot steadier than handheld, I found that it swayed slightly as I clung to it, so I used the camera shake adjustment in iMovie to reduce this effect.
The image quality of the Tough isn’t as sparkly as my regular camera (plus I still had it on the macro setting, which can’t have helped) so I tried using iMovie’s ‘romantic’ filter to soften the pixelated effect. This filter adds a soft vignette to the frame. The gradual zoom-in was also added in iMovie, using the ‘Ken Burns’ effect in the cropping tools section.